Friday, March 18, 2011

Friday Night Relaxer: Another night off (and a bit of The Late Show)

Just a quick one tonight, because once a gain life interrupts.

I know this makes it a few Fridays in a row (so much for my advice of being regular) without a post, but I swear I will be back next Friday (now if you could just come up with an idea for me to write on, that’d be great).

In place of a real post, let me take the lazy way out and show some videos.

Like many Gen Xers in the early 1990s, for me life on Saturday nights meant sitting in front of the TV and watching The Late Show before heading out to the pub (where invariably a few mates and I would retell the skits from that night’s The Late Show – yeah I was pretty boring). The Working Dog guys back when they were the D-Generation – and permanently “undergraduate” – were must see TV.

I have the Champagne Comedy DVD set and at least once a year I’ll get it out and go through it. Usually however this ends we me thinking, “How could that be nearly 20 years ago? Where has my life gone?”.

My favourite segments were the interviews with (usually) Rob Sitch doing some absurd impression. The interviews have held up incredibly well, my favourite of all time however was the one with John Hewson:

A close runner up was the immortal Imran “like a tiger” Khan:

I also liked it when in the last series they set aside a bit more time to do a short-film like pieces. My favourite of these (perhaps because I now work in the film policy area of the public service) was Warren Perso: The Last Aussie Auteur. I’ll still every now and then let out a “Listen to me Barry! Listen to me!”. People of course then look at me oddly, so I do try to keep it to a minimum.

Geez, I wish we had a show like it now.

And lastly (and not The Late Show related – but still in the Gen-X wheelhouse) Tom Cowie from Crikey linked to this today on Twitter – it is a brilliant little melody by Fredde Gredde of some songs from The Simpsons. And as with anything good about The Simpsons they all come comes from the first half dozen seasons (yeah there’ll be a post on that topic one day…). If you like it check out his medley of TV themes:

I loved that show - probably the best sketch I ever saw on it was a sendup of the Thunderbirds where it literally took one of them a minute to walk puppet like across a room, commence sitting down and then the "Dad" character asks them to "Shut the Door Son"